Monday, June 22, 2015

SuperPhillip Central's Favorite VGMs - The Beginning of the March Towards 1,000 Edition

Welcome to a new work week here at SuperPhillip Central! As is customary, I have five new video game music tracks to share on this fine Monday. We're starting the march towards the historic 1,000 VGM volume, and I can't wait to share even more video game music goodness with all of you in the future.

For now, we have a nice smorgasbord of VGMs to listen to. We start off with some Valkyrie Profile, making, I believe, its first appearance on the old Favorite VGMs segment. Then we follow that will some Mario and Sonic in the forms of Mario Kart 64 and Sonic Colors! Wrapping things up are two songs, one from F-Zero GX and one from Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, also making its debut on SuperPhillip Central's Favorite VGMs! If you're ready to get to the music, let's get to 'em!

This edition of SuperPhillip Central's Favorite VGMs starts off with a classic PlayStation RPG series, Valkyrie Profile by Enix. It was well known for its intense combat and lead female heroine. The soundtrack was by the incomparable Motoi Sakuraba, who just so happened to composer one of my favorite PlayStation RPGs Star Ocean: The Second Story.

We saw this game appear on my top 50 game soundtracks of all time list last week. Kenta Nagata's Mario Kart 64 soundtrack fills me with such grand nostalgia for the Nintendo 64 era of gaming. It was a simpler time with simpler graphics, simpler budgets, and a focus on my favorite genre, cartoon platformers. Ah, to be young again...

Speaking of cartoon platformers, we have Sonic Colors up next. This was one of two 3D Sonic games that are hard to argue that they aren't of good quality in nearly every shape and form. The gameplay was solid, the level design was smartly done, and the music continues to be great to listen to. This final boss theme is an orchestral take on the uptempo main vocal theme of Sonic Colors.

F-Zero GX is a soundtrack of two parts. One is heard when in the menus and racing on the intense tracks of the game. The other is heard as each pilot's theme song. There's over 35 pilots to play as in the game, and each has their own theme song, ranging from electronica to hard rock. Princia Ramode, along with Captain Falcon, Dr. Stewart, Leon, and Super Arrow, are some of my favorites.

Before the franchise goes mobile with Breath of Fire VI (the jury's still out on whether it will be a worthy entry in the series or not), Breath of Fire had a very atypical entry on the PlayStation 2. It was a dungeon crawler with a focus on time management. It was quite difficult, too! Still, I rate it rather highly along with the rest of the engaging games in this excellent RPG series.